As a contribution to the debate about the character and purpose of the work, see Howard Williamson’s sharp Opinion piece, I’ll tell you what youth workers really do
His closing anecdote about first being inspected makes me smile and cry a little.
My problem as a youth worker was being able to work out in advance what this balance of practice was going to be. It all depended on the groups of young people I was working with, what was unfolding in their lives, and the demands and requests they made of me. I realised this was a rather unpalatable position for managers and inspectors almost from the start of my paid youth work career. The first inspector to visit me asked to see a copy of my unit plan for the coming year. I told him bluntly I did not have one. He seemed to think I was joking or lying. I simply said that I would like him to judge my real practice retrospectively, not my paper practice prospectively. In a year’s time, I said, I’ll tell you what I did.
In today’s climate, try saying this and getting away with it!
IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK 
“In today’s climate, try saying this and getting away with it!”
Well, funnily enough….
I’ll dig out my response to an inspection I had about a year ago. It felt at the time that we had been inspected by the Chuckle Brothers but after reading their report on my project I felt like I’d been attacked with a steel alloy baseball bat.
Our Youth service is using the NYA Quality Mark as a replacement Offsted. Over the past year workers in Brent have been pressurised into producing huge folders of evidence on the thirteen areas of competency covered by the NYA QM.
Targets,”golden threads”,policy statements on this that and the other, EYS evidence etc so that when the inspectors call they will see a group of workers whose performance has been dramatically improved by the paperwork systems that are now in place. Nothing is further from the truth. The portfolio building pressure has demoralised staff and taken away time that they could have spent working with young people and re-directed it to produce heaps of paperwork that will be hidden in cupboards once the NYA inspectors have left. They are only doing it to keep the senior managers off their backs.
The bureaucratic approach of the NYA QM is disappointing. It panders to the whole “new managerialism” in which paper evidence is God. In Brent the senior managers rarely visit youthwork provision and are more or less totally informed by paperwork or comments in supervision sessions or staff meetings. I would like to see an NYA initiative that looks at what is really happening in youth work. Initiatives that ultimately lead to window dressing are in no ones interest.
But how do you prove it? And if you do prove it is anyone really going to do anything about it? Let’s face it, the systems are in place to protect higher management. But the ultimate issue is how long will you keep your job if you attempt to expose ”the system” for what it is?
I worked for a local authority that prided itself on it’s NYA QM. It also had high outputs for accreditation. The things I witnessed there were totally outrageous. I remember the week before the moderation deadline I stepped into the youth club where I was based and found total mayhem. The centre had been closed down for the week while sessional youth workers forged all the young people’s uncompleted portfolios. And I soon found out that this was happening all over the place. I didn’t really know how to react. My initial reaction was that the system deserves this level of dishonesty. The system created this level of dishonesty. But I really knew that this dishonesty was just going to feed the system and make it stronger. At the end of the month, the service would have impressive statistics which would prove that accreditation was working.
The paperwork was/is absolutely ridiculous. I was once asked to contribute to a session for one of the area school councils to show “what youth workers do”. I recall being a little annoyed about being asked to contribute to the bullshit that other team leaders were presenting. I decided to give the group a dose of reality and show them the amount of paperwork required to achieve a simple activity away from the youth club. I pulled out a large wad of forms and went through them one at a time. I started with the proposal for the activity that I would send to my line-manager for approval for payment; the requisition form for cash or cheques; the booking form for the minibus; the LEA activity approval form A, form B and form C; the risk assessment forms; the parental consent forms and accompanying letter; the photographic evidence consent form; my timesheets for the activity; the mini-bus hire form; the mini-bus check sheet; the mini-bus defect book; my EYS sheets for all related sessions; the attendance register; etc etc etc I actually ended up surprising myself.
The only real hope we have to change the system is if enough people engage in honest dialogue. But this just isn’t happening to the degree that it needs to happen.
Lenny and Peter
I’ve hesitated about replying, hoping that your honesty might stimulate other accounts of problematic practice. A crucial dimension to the In Defence campaign will be our willingness or otherwise to be critical about past and present practice – not in order to wallow in guilt, but to be clear about the strengths and weaknesses of what we’ve done thus far.
I need to reflect upon some of my practices as a manager. I hope I encouraged workers to be critically reflective and honest internally, but in doing so I took it upon myself to present to the hierarchy and employer a picture rosier than reality. My judgement, mistaken perhaps, was that I could not trust those above me to struggle with the contradictions of an uneven and volatile practice. I should explore this contradiction further.
In for a penny….
This piece prompted me to dig out a copy of a report of an inspection I had about 3 years ago. It kind of highlights a similar lack of empathy with the true value of youth work.
When I was given a date for my unit inspection it was an evening which I had planned street-based reconnaissance of two areas. It was also going to take place on a very cold, very wet November night. I was given some advice from a couple of youth service veterans of the inspection to “prepare something special” for their visit. It seemed an easy option. I had 2 established groups who were both engaged in structured programmes. In fact, I had just completed a busy programme with 12 young people and I could quite easily extend this to an extra session to impress the inspectors. But I couldn’t see the logic in deceit and I didn’t want to lose integrity for the sake of “an easy ride”. Reconnaissance is an essential part of the process and I couldn’t see the point of hiding it.
So, listening to people advising me on how to cheat the system made it clear that this was pretty much the norm. But then institutional dishonesty was never going to be much of a surprise. I’d already witnessed the mass forging of accreditation portfolios, creative budgeting, imaginative sessional recordings and exaggerated monitoring of contact stats. The whole service was mounted on a framework of fear and fabrication. But from the outside looking in, it looked sleek, efficient and effective.
So here’s the deal. My inspection is called a “peer” inspection because I’m being inspected by 2 of the most senior officers in the service, 2 (very polite, functional but nervous) young people and their supervising youth worker. So before we venture any further into this abyss of comedy farce, I’d like you to image what that looks like on a wet November evening walking around one of the most socially challenged housing estates in the area. Imagine the potential impact on any groups I’ve had previous contact with when I turn up mob handed with two posh women with clip boards, two school boffins and three frustrated youth workers. When you have this scene fixed clearly in your head, then try to work out why I was the only person present who thought this was a very, very bad idea.
This bizarre situation started off with an inspection of the youth centre where my office was based. This was really frustrating because it wasn’t my youth centre. It wasn’t even my office. I was just based in it. I had no management responsibility for the building at all. I was a detached youth worker. I can’t go in to too much detail about the session because I just haven’t got the heart to recount it but it really was the most depressing experience I’ve ever had.
The evaluation report was horrid. It was vile. It was de-motivating, insulting and entirely irrelevant. I put together a response to the report and requested a meeting with my evaluators. At the meeting there was an admission that quite a lot of assumption had gone into the evaluation and that maybe the method was not entirely suitable for detached work. I received an apology from all three evaluators (although they refused to put it in writing). This was my concluding response;
“The overall feel of the evaluation was hostile and there was also a substantial lack of empathy with youth work practice. The negativity of the evaluation was quite shocking in parts and there seemed to be a determination not just to highlight but to presume and fabricate negative aspects throughout the observations. It is difficult to see who will benefit from this process. My team were left in a state of shock and utter bewilderment and the young evaluators involved seemed to be almost as confused as I was. Some of the recommendations and suggestions were irrelevant and the rest are confusing. As to the comment on your evaluation that there was “no curriculum observed”, I generally follow the method of making contact and assessing needs before applying curriculum. “